Americans Used Nearly 10 Trillion Megabytes of Mobile Data Last Year (washingtonpost.com) 91
An anonymous reader writes: A report from CTIA released Monday found that consumers have nearly doubled their consumption of mobile data last year. It found that last month, consumers chugged down 804 billion megabytes of data, which adds up to a total of 9.65 billion gigabytes. The numbers are especially significant when compared to previous years. "From December 2013 to December 2014, U.S. data consumption grew by about 26 percent. But over the following year, it grew by 137 percent," writes Washington Post. YouTube and Netflix account for over half of North American internet traffic at peak hours, according to the networking equipment firm Sandvine. That figure spikes to 70 percent when streaming audio is part of the mix. The wireless industry as a result raked in nearly $200 billion last year alone, which is a 70 percent jump compared to a decade ago. The numbers are likely to rise as more and more devices become connected to the internet. With news of films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar coming to Netflix this September, we're likely to see mobile data use increase even more this year.
8 of those "Trillion Megabytes" was me (Score:1)
Sorry. I pirate a lot of content with my phone.
Whatever happened to (Score:3, Informative)
Petabytes?
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Thank you. I suppose we can be glad it's not in "Libraries of Congress".
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You need to think volumetrically, where the standard is the 40 foot intermodal shipping container. You can buy 4TB 2.5" HDDs, which are about 6 cubic inches. A shipping container has 40x8x8 = 2560 ft^3 or 4423680 in^3. So it would hold 737,280 2.5" HDDs, or just shy of 3 exabytes. So the nearly 10 exabytes in TFA could fit in 3 standard intermodal containers. Or it would all fit in a medium sized house (cabling and cooling would take additional space). If you used 1TB SD cards (expensive, but available), y
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What happened to petabytes? Exabytes.
10 trillion million is 10*10^12*10^6=10*10^18. (Kilo=10^3, mega=10^6, giga=10^9, tera=10^12, peta=10^15, exa=10^18)
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Ten Billion Gigabytes
Ten Million Terabytes
Ten Thousand Petabytes
Ten Exabytes.
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Ten Billion Gigabytes
Ten Million Terabytes
Ten Thousand Petabytes
Ten Exabytes.
0.01 Zettabytes
Does that title reflect consumer society or what? (Score:5, Informative)
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
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Why not? People should be able to understand there's an infrastructure to put in place and maintain for the data transfers to occur.
What I meant was, when you make people think about moving data in terms of using up that data, then it becomes easy to rape their wallets, because people instinctively have this feeling that they consume something that's being lost - which isn't what's happening at all.
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Something *is* being lost. Every packet transmitted for you is a packet that could not be transmitted for someone else. When you rent a car, you don't consumer the car (well you kind of do through wear and tear but ignoring that), but you are still consuming a resource, which is the use of that car.
This is different than a television broadcast, for example, where you receiving the television broadcast does not prevent anyone else from receiving the broadcast. It is not consuming a resource (at least not
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Also there's the nature of wireless transmission, which doesn't allow for collision detection. So wireless transmission uses collision avoidance. So when you're sending a packet, that's time when someone else couldn't send a packet
Demand is cyclic, but cell carriers ignore this (Score:2)
Every packet transmitted for you is a packet that could not be transmitted for someone else.
Only when the network is operating at capacity. When the network is operating at less than capacity, every packet can be transmitted, meaning the opportunity cost of transmitting someone's packet is zero. The demand for the service of transmitting a packet is cyclic on a daily and weekly basis, lowest in the early mornings in a given time zone. Satellite carriers realize this and don't run the meter between, say, midnight and 5 AM (source: exede.com) So why do cellular carriers charge a flat rate for airtim
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So why do cellular carriers charge a flat rate for airtime regardless of demand?
This is what is known as a market failure.
The best model would probably be one that charges people per byte transferred, with the rate varying depending on demand at the time of transfer. If the network is below capacity the rate could be very low to simply cover operating costs.
If a supermarket has some food that is about to expire (no longer able to be sold), one might argue that the market should give this food away for free because it will simply be wasted otherwise. That's true, but a better solution
Long distance on landline was discounted at night (Score:2)
Telecom customers (and probably producers as well) as a whole are just not savvy enough to deal with a complicated pricing system
Back before the majority of postpaid cellular plans came with unlimited voice minutes, a lot of cellular carriers and landline long-distance companies offered discounts on night and weekend calls. Are telecom customers less tech savvy than they used to be?
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Currently data can be transferred on your phone by apps that may be running in the background.
Android logs the amount of data transferred by each app running on a device and lets the user sort a list of apps by decreasing data volume. Is this not enough?
Voice calls were never made without the customers knowledge
Almost never. (Search for butt dialing.)
It is not really feasible or helpful to keep logs of every IP address and size of every packet transferred to/from your phone.
So let me get this straight: Unlike satellite ISPs, cellular ISPs have failed to offer a reward for moving away from congested times of day, and you're rationalizing it as because the device communicates with more distinct destinations than when voice calls dominated cellular usage. Let me see if I can think of
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Android logs the amount of data transferred by each app running on a device and lets the user sort a list of apps by decreasing data volume. Is this not enough?
I'm not saying that it's too complicated for software. I am saying that it's too complicated for the average customer. And it's not that they can't do it, it's just a question of whether the the added complexity for the customer is worth the increase in efficiency. I don't think telecoms want better efficiency (lower prices, higher profit) if it means a large portion of their customers are angry and frustrated.
So let me get this straight: Unlike satellite ISPs, cellular ISPs have failed to offer a reward for moving away from congested times of day, and you're rationalizing it as because the device communicates with more distinct destinations than when voice calls dominated cellular usage. Let me see if I can think of a way to interact with Internet data transfer accounting mechanisms already present in mobile operating systems.
I am not rationalizing anything. I am giving you what I think the reason is that telecoms have
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Why not? People should be able to understand there's an infrastructure to put in place and maintain for the data transfers to occur.
What I meant was, when you make people think about moving data in terms of using up that data, then it becomes easy to rape their wallets, because people instinctively have this feeling that they consume something that's being lost - which isn't what's happening at all.
If advertisers think that adblockers are bad now - just wait till they try that trick. I'm really curious what most people pay - I stay within my cap - usually - and it takes almost nothing to hit it. A few webpages and boom there's the message from Verizon.
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Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
I suspect 9 trillion of those megabytes was advertisements.
In addition, it was probably the least productive data use ever.
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Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
They exchanged data, but that does not mean they did not use it. After all, can you get back the data that was transmitted (in particular content in the streaming use case, because content is data)? This is like saying you exchange but not use signals when talking over a phone line.
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No, I do in fact *use* data. Data comes from a sever, over the network, into my phone, where it is shown on the screen for a while. When I close that browser window that was showing that text or image or playing that song or movie, that data is *gone*.
Don't worry, though -- the server can make more upon request.
9EB? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only 9EB?
That doesn't sound like much...
Re:9EB? (Score:5, Funny)
Only 9EB?
That doesn't sound like much...
Indeed. I had an Exabyte tape drive [wikipedia.org] back in the 1980s.
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Only 9EB? That doesn't sound like much...
Indeed. I had an Exabyte tape drive [wikipedia.org] back in the 1980s.
Of course, that "Exabyte" drive could only hold 3.5 GB. You'd have needed some 2.6 trillion cartridges to store 9 EB. With modern tapes [gizmag.com] you could do it with only 41,000 cartridges.
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For comparison: Finland uses 0.6EB with 5 million residents, and Germany the same 0.6EB with 80 million. US has 320 million people, so it means that US uses roughly three to four times the data per capita compared to Germany. The Finns on the other hand use four to five times more data than the USians.
https://twitter.com/tefficient/status/733578831433326592
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14,000,000 Volkswagens.
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...
...
That comes out about 7 1968 Cadillac Fleetwoods.
If you're billed 1 cent per megabyte (Score:2)
I assume "megabytes" was used because that's the unit in which carriers state their data transfer tariffs.
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I was under the impression that real estate ownership was a public record. Have you located the owner of each such rental unit? Have you located the bank owning each empty house under foreclosure? Have you informed them of the vote and polled them about how they plan to vote? What was their reply?
10 trillion megabytes?! (Score:4, Funny)
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That's 1 million Libraries of Congress!!
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Assuming everyone uses up to the 250 GB cap, that means there are only about 3 million cell phone users in the United States. No, wait... I think I did something wrong.... :-D
But seriously, 10 billion gigabytes / 190 million users / 12 months = ~4.4 gigabytes per month average. So why do metered cell phone plans measured in megabytes even still exist?
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Assuming everyone uses up to the 250 GB cap
The 250 GB per month cap is for wired Internet. Caps for wireless are much smaller, on the order of 3 to 10 GB per month.
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That was the reason for the ":-D".
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So why do metered cell phone plans measured in megabytes even still exist?
For the same reason that metered cell phone plans measured in minutes (rather than hours) exist: some carriers want to compete for the lowest-usage subscribers.
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It's around 10 quadrillion kilobytes!
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How many cat videos is that?
Nah (Score:2)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte
Vimeo and YT are public access (Score:2)
It has turned into basic cable.
But with the equivalent of a lot more public access channels than any basic cable operator has ever had.
"Americans Used Nearly 10 Trillion Megabytes" (Score:2)
Only because we weren't allowed to use more. Artificial limitations and all
eh (Score:2)
Last mile solution (Score:2)
In a technically rational world, the last mile would be almost entirely wireless, with P2P cache support for highly popular viral content. The fiber backbones would only run to broadcast distances, though most of the mobile devices would use variable power transmitters so that local wireless bandwidth would remain constant even as device density increased.
We can't have that for several reasons:
1. Governments want to control the distribution of all information and such wireless networks would be hard to cont
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In a technically insane world, the last mile would be almost entirely wireless
FTFY
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Forgot one important item and one minor point. There could be healthy competition between competing networks of wireless access points, whereas fiber to the home is a natural monopoly. That leads to the perhaps minor point of whether or not any person or even family needs an entire fiber. I don't think so, but if it turns out that I'm wrong at some point, then that is actually an additional argument for the wireless last mile. Easier to add more bundles of fibers feeding the access points, whereas running b
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Used ? (Score:2)
Should that be used, consumed, or merely facilitated the movement of ? It is not like we don't know where the data is, or the bandwidth is gone. No one was deprived of anything, unless you believe the MPAA in the fact that every bit of money out there that is not in their pocket must be because someone pirated something, and there by deprived them of their right to profit off of everything.
At 4% of capacity? (Score:2, Informative)
Looking around, I see that a 4G LTE cell tower can handle 100Mb/s in 3 different sectors for 300Mb/s total. According to http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/, there are 205k cell towers in the US. If we assume each one supplies exactly one carrier with exactly one transceiver and that they're all 4G LTE, we'd average about 4.1% usage.
No wonder carriers charge for data, were at risk of hitting 5% of capacity.
Seriously? (Score:2)
I understand this is the equivalent of clickbait for /., but we already have a SI prefix to represent an amount this large.
I think 10 Exabytes would have conveyed the point, not some convoluted nomenclature like 10 trillion Megabytes >.>